Why Learning Chinese Is Hard For Foreigners

Lately, The Chinese language has become increasingly popular all over the world. Learning Chinese has become a trend among the people from all over the world. Reasons for learning Chinese vary from business purposes to education. Now there has an independent school become the first in the UK to make mandarin chinese compulsory for pupils as it is reflecting the growing importance of China on the world stage. However, foreigners face difficulties when learning Chinese as their foreign language. So, why is it so difficult for learning Chinese to a foreigner? First of all, the writing system is too complex. One does not simply learn a language without learning how to write them out. The beauty of the characters is undeniable. However, writing it out is not a easy job for a new learner. Foreigners complained that the writing system is not phonetic. There is no obvious semantic clue in the radical. Besides, we have to master the most basic strokes before we can write. As we know, Chinese characters are ideographs and most foreigners find it difficult to master. Moreover, Chinese has nothing that corresponds to an alphabet, which made it hard for foreigners to recognize the radicals since there are so many characters one has to learn before you can actually read a text in Chinese. Next, the tonal language sounds weird for the foreigners. There are four tones in Chinese as we all known. The same pronounce of a word with a different tone have different meanings. Many foreigners may complain about the vowels and the consonants are difficult to remember, but it becomes much more challenging when you are trying to communicate in Chinese as the tones of the Chinese characters changes according to different kinds of word collocation. Besides, you cant cheat by using cognates. For other languages like Spanish, you can still guess the words by looking at the English words with a little foreign make-up such as problema which means problem, but that doesnt work on Chinese. If you dont know means you really dont know as u cant guess the word as the characters are too different. Besides, the cultures between the eastern countries and the western are too different. The knowledge and ideas of Chinese people was not shared by westerners. Moreover, the presence of traditional Chinese is also very confusing for a foreigner to learn Chinese. Traditional Chinese looks like a series of strange code for the foreigners. Not even the native Chinese learned it very well. So, it makes the foreigners even harder to learn traditional Chinese as ancient Chinese people have their own language system. In conclusion, Chinese is not easy to be learned for the foreigners. Every language has its own difficulties for different people. However, if you are a foreigner and you wish to give it a try, you should understand the reasons above. This will help to get you ready for Chinese language learning.